"It's Muslim women from around the world," she said of the book, "pushing through barriers and shattering stereotypes about what it means to be Muslim and what it means to be a woman."

Their subjects include Palestinian race-car drivers "who are racing men. We've got an Iranian race-car driver who keeps getting banned, because she's beating men. We've got astronauts, Muslim women who are Goth Punk, Muslim women who play the electric guitar in a full burqa and veil. We've got this full range of what it means to be a Muslim woman today."

Seema Yasmin, formerly with The Dallas Morning News and a former professor of public health at the University of Texas at Dallas, spoke on the Healthy City panel during The Dallas Festival of Ideas on Feb. 20, 2016, at Fair Park in Dallas.

(Ashley Landis/Staff Photographer)

Yasmin left The News in 2017, but while she's a News alumna, she is, she says, "a forever fan." She went from Dallas to Palo Alto, Calif., to become a John S. Knight Fellow in Journalism. And that led to a position on the school's faculty.

She's a clinical assistant professor in the school of medicine and director of research and education at the Stanford Health Communication Initiative. Yasmin's résumé includes having written an earlier book. She has also won an Emmy Award and has a medical degree from the University of Cambridge.

"I love California in general," she says of her current home.

Muslim Woman Napping, an illustration by Fahmida Azim.

Yasmin says the article she and Azim collaborated on for The News led directly to the book, with a publisher expressing interest soon after it ran. The story, she said, "gained a lot of traction online" and via social media. She and Azim worked quickly to complete a book proposal, so now, she said, "Here we are."

During her time in Dallas, Yasmin also served as a faculty member at the University of Texas at Dallas. And she happened to be the newspaper's science writer when the worst happened.

The first known case of Ebola in the U.S. arrived in Dallas on Sept. 20, 2014. The patient, Thomas Eric Duncan, was treated at Texas Presbyterian Hospital and died of Ebola on Oct. 8. Two nurses who treated Duncan at Presbyterian were also infected. They were later transferred to other hospitals and recovered.

But Yasmin's drama didn't end there. She and her husband had bought a home in suburban Rowlett, which they loved — for as long as it lasted. An EF-4 tornado, packing winds up to 180 mph, destroyed the home on Dec. 26, 2015.

Homeowner Gary Hale (left) took a lunch break with his grandson Gabriel Hale while cleaning up at his house, which was leveled by a tornado in Rowlett on Dec. 26, 2015.

Without being able to reach them, "I was convinced," she said, "that they had died."

All three survived, though their home was a goner. Ever the journalist, Yasmin later wrote a piece about the ordeal, which won the Mayborn literary non-fiction essay award and appeared in the journal Ten Spurs.

"That was a part of my Dallas experience, and although it sounds awful, the good thing was, everybody was fine. The house was rebuilt, and my experience of it was the Texas hospitality and warmth that followed."

Seema Yasmin at Stanford University

(Courtesy Seema Yasmin)

Born in England, Yasmin grew up in London and moved to the United States in 2011 for a job at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta as an Epidemic Intelligence Service officer. She then went to journalism school at the University of Toronto. The News hired her as soon as she graduated in 2014, when she moved to Rowlett.

Yasmin treasured the opportunity to "cut my teeth" in a big-city newsroom, where, as fate would have it, The News just happened to have a scientific expert on staff when Ebola invaded Dallas.

But she was also involved in another big story — the downtown Dallas police shootings on July 7, 2016, when five officers were killed and nine others wounded. Yasmin was part of the breaking news reporting team named Pulitzer finalists in 2017.

Yasmin called the honor bittersweet.

"It was so incredible to get recognition for our hard work," she said, "but it truly was an awful incident that happened right near our newsroom."

But now, a much happier story awaits, when Yasmin and Azim release their book.